"You dear!" she said; "you certainly are the best-looking boy in all Florida. When did you come? Is Jim Wayward's yacht here still? And why didn't he come to see me?" "The _Ariani_ sailed for Miami last night after I landed. I left my card, but the office people rang and rang and could get no answer--" "I was in bed! How stupid of me! I retired early because Virginia and I had been dissipating shamefully all the week and my aged bones required a rest.... And now tell me all about this new commission of yours. I have met the Cardross family; everybody at Palm Beach is talking about the magnificent park Mr. Cardross is planning; and your picture has appeared in the local paper, and I've told everybody you're quite wonderful, and everybody now is informing everybody else that you're quite wonderful!" His very gay aunt lay back in her great soft chair, pushing with both fair hands the masses of chestnut hair from her forehead, and smiling at him out of her golden brown eyes--the jolliest, frankest of eyes--the sort even women trust instinctively at first glimpse. So he sat there and told her all about his commission and how this man, Neville Cardross, whom he had never even seen, had written to him and asked him to make the most splendid park in America around the Cardross villa, and had invited him to be his guest during his stay in Florida. "They evidently are nice people from the way Mr. Cardross writes," he said. "You say you know them, Constance?" "I've met them several times--the way you meet people here. They have a villa--rather imposing in an exotic fashion. Why, yes, Garry, they _are_ nice; dreadfully wealthy, tremendously popular. Mrs. Carrick, the married daughter, is very agreeable; her mother is amiable and dreadfully stout. Then there's a boy of your age--Gray Cardross--a well-mannered youth who drives motors, and whom Mr. Classon calls a 'speed-mad cub.' Then there is Cecile Cardross--a debutante of last winter, and then--" Miss Palliser hesitated, crossed one knee over the other, and sat gently swinging her slippered foot and looking at her nephew. "Does that conclude the list of the Cardross family?" he asked. "N-no. There remains the beauty of the family, Shiela." She continued to survey him with smiling intentness, and went on slowly: "Shiela Cardross; _the_ girl here. People are quite mad about her, I assure you. My dear, every man at Palm Beach tags after her; rows of callow youths sit and gaze at her very footprints in the sand when she crosses the beach; she turns masculine heads to the verge of permanent dislocation. No guilty man escapes; even Courtlandt Classon is meditating treachery to me, and Mr. Cuyp has long been wavering and Gussie Vetchen too! the wretch!... We poor women try hard to like her--but, Garry, _is_ it human to love such a girl?" "It's divine, Constance, so you'll like her."